Average number of times that President Bush has used the pronoun “I” in his State of the Union addresses: 36 Average number of times that President Clinton used that pronoun in his addresses: 103 Harper’s Index, January 2007 Via John McCaslin at the Washington Times »

The Washington Wizards won for the 13th time in their last 16 outings, defeating Orlando 112-111. This is the 13th straight game in which the Wiz have scored more than 100. Gilbert Arenas had 36, his average since the team’s hot streak began. He’s almost made me forget Earl “the Pearl” Monroe. The win moved Washington into first place in the NBA Southeast. It’s the first time in 28 years »

Diana West labels 2006 “the year of speaking dangerously.” She’s referring to the global assault against those who criticize “the religion of peace.” Now, in light of that assault, Diana fears that 2007 will be “the year of shutting up.” After all, “why speak dangerously when you can simply not speak at all?” In fact, she suggests that the year of shutting up began a few months ago when Pope »

…in Baghdad. Which means that Saddam Hussein could be executed at any time: Saddam Hussein will be executed no later than Saturday, said an Iraqi judge authorized to attend his hanging. The former dictator’s lawyers said he had been transferred from U.S. custody, but an Iraqi official said he was still in the hands of American guards. The physical transfer of Saddam to Iraqi authorities was believed to be one »

If President Bush decides to send more troops into Iraq, he will have the support of at least one (but probably only one) Democratic Senator. In a Washington Post op-ed, Joe Lieberman explains why he favors a troop “surge.” Lieberman argues that “as long as insurgents and death squads terrorize Baghdad, Iraq’s nascent democratic institutions cannot be expected to function, much less win the trust of the people.” He also »

A few days ago, radio talk show host Scott Hennen posted an email he received from a soldier in Iraq who witnessed John Kerry’s visit to the troops in Baghdad. This soldier offered his own observations to the effect that Kerry’s welcome was less than warm, and he sent along this picture of Kerry eating in the dining hall of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad (click to enlarge): We posted »

One of the characteristics of the Minneapolis Star Tribune that makes it such a bad paper is the relentlessness of its bias. From coverage of the local news, to the editorial page, to the letters to the editor, to its metro columnists the paper is saturated with a leftist know-nothing perspective. The one exception is columnist Katherine Kersten, whom the paper treats like a virus against which antibodies must regularly »

The North Carolina bar filed charges today against Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong in connection with the Duke lacrosse prosecution. Nifong apparently has been under investigation since last March. He is charged with making inflammatory comments to the media about the defendants in the case, and with “dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation” in connection with the exculpatory DNA evidence that he apparently tried to conceal. Nifong faces penalties ranging up »

This account by Thomas DeFrank of the New York Daily News casts doubt on Woodward’s version of what Gerald Ford said about Iraq. DeFrank met frequently with Ford, and did so for the last time in May of this year. On that occasion, Ford said he’d told Bush he supported the war in Iraq but that Bush had erred by staking the invasion on weapons of mass destruction. According to »

We haven’t said anything about Cindy Sheehan for a long time. What’s interesting is that neither, for the most part, have the Democrats. Mainstream liberals have dropped her like a hot potato as her nuttiness has increasingly been revealed. Blog of the Week Flopping Aces catches up with Sheehan’s latest wackiness, as Sheehan declines to join in the good will surrounding former Gerald Ford’s death. Why? Because the Iraq war »

Bob Woodword reports that Gerald Ford told him in July 2004 that he didn’t think he would have gone to war in Iraq and that he would have looked harder at other options, such as sanctions. Ford’s view was probably in accord with that a solid majority of 90 year-olds. Most men I’ve known became less favorably inclined towards war as they become very old. Of course, by now Ford’s »

The Jerusalem Post reports that according to Israeli security agency Shin Bet, Hizbollah is paying terrorist groups in Gaza to violate the cease-fire ostensibly in place between Israel and the terrorists by firing rockets from Gaza: Hizbullah is paying Palestinian splinter groups “thousands of dollars” for each Kassam rocket fired at the western Negev, The Jerusalem Post has learned. According to Israeli intelligence information, Hizbullah is smuggling cash into the »

In June 2002 I wrote a column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune regarding Yasser Arafat’s responsibility for the 1973 assassination of two United States State Department officers — Ambassador Cleo Noel and charge d’affaires Curtis Moore — in Khartoum, Sudan. The column was based on accounts of the events in David Korn’s Assassination in Khartoum, Neil Livingstone and David Halevy’s Inside the PLO, and the testimony of former National Security »

The man who opened my eyes to the claims of the great tradition is Dartmouth English Professor Jeffrey Hart. Professor Hart disabused me of my addled adolescent liberalism and smugness over the four years I was his undergraduate student. He was an incredibly generous teacher. Like so many of his Dartmouth students, I remain profoundly grateful and deeply indebted to him. Having written an admiring book about National Review in »

Sen. Joseph Biden says he will try to block President Bush from sending more troops to Iraq. Biden, who now heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says he will hold hearings next month in the hope of persuading the president not to carry through with the “troop surge” he is said to be planning. There are grounds for questioning the wisdom of such a surge, and it’s possible that serious »

Don’t miss Hugh Hewitt’s interview with Joseph Rago, the young Wall Street Journal editor who thinks blogs are “written by fools to be read by imbeciles.” Hugh walks Rago through some of the major news stories of the year and, without much resistance, shows how blogs helped drive them, often outdoing traditional media. Rago’s one counterexample — a story as to which he thinks the MSM clearly outdid the blogs »